Replay: Building a Hiring Culture Where Talent Is Everyone’s Job

Hi everyone, Johnny Campbell here. If you're checking your feed and wondering where the new episodes of Hiring Excellence are, don't worry, we haven't gone far. My team and I are currently in the studio recording a phenomenal lineup of brand new conversations for our upcoming season. I promise the new guest lineup is going to blow you away. But while we put the final polish on those new episodes, I wanted to dip back into the archives and pull out a true fan favorite. Today's replay is one of our most popular episodes ever. It's my conversation with Kelly Jones where she spoke about how to ensure the hiring is seen as a team sport. The feedback we got in this one when it first aired was absolutely off the charts. The strategies we discussed are timeless and honestly they're just as critical right now as they were the day we recorded it. So whether you missed it the first time around or you're just tuning in for a refresher master class, you're in for a treat. And since recording this, Kelly's gone on to be promoted to the chief people officer of Cisco. Keep an eye on your feed for our brand new episodes launching very soon. But for now, enjoy this classic episode of Hiring Excellence. Thank you so much. I have to say I so enjoyed listening to the first part of that panel. It's always so fascinating to know that as we're having these discussions, we're not alone. So, thank you for inviting me to this chat today. I'm in Denver, Colorado. For those of you familiar with the US, it's right near the Rocky Mountains. As Johnny mentioned, I work for Cisco Systems. That is uh Cisco with a C versus an S. I know we have a couple Cisco out there. And for those of you that might not be familiar with Cisco, we are an IT software, computer networking, and collaboration company. We're based in San Jose. We do business in about 362 countries around the world. We have a fairly diverse portfolio when it comes to hiring. Everything from software engineers to customer experience to our corporate functions group. So, we do a good bit in that space. I've personally worked in talent acquisition for longer than I'd like to admit because it puts a little bit of an age on me. Uh, but I would say more largely in the talent space. So, I've been at Cisco about 14 years. In that 14 years, I've done I'm on my 11th job actually at Cisco. So I'm one of the one company many careers people. All of those roles have been focused on talent, talent acquisition, talent development in the HR business partner space. And prior to that, I worked in um the IT staffing agency world, which is interesting when you talk about culture of hiring because I've kind of run the spectrum of hiring is the lifeblood of the revenue of an organization to working in an enterprise where hiring is one of many things that people do. So I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for the invite, Johnny. and particularly passionate about this topic. So would love to get into it. — Well, I might ask you then to start with perhaps defining hiring culture as you see it. And I we've had great definitions from I Michaela initially, but perhaps you could define it in your words and also perhaps explain what does it mean today for Cisco? — Sure. U there were some great explanations and I was nodding off camera as I was hearing some of it. When I think about hiring culture, it's a little bit like if you've ever known anyone who does CrossFit, that kind of that global sports where Sunday morning I'm out with my coffee walking my dog and you walk by and you see these people pushing tires and running around buildings. Um the question of how do you know if someone does CrossFit? They're going to tell you the first five minutes you meet them. Like they're literally you're never going to have to guess. And that type of fanatic fandom about something is really where you want to go with a hiring culture. And some of these things were mentioned earlier, but the idea that you can recruit and hire people from anywhere. And at Cisco, it's about a hiring culture, but you touched on this earlier. It's not just hiring, it's hiring, and it's talent mobility. I almost feel like you can't bifrocate those things because we look for leaders to have leadership capability when it comes to building their teams. and building their teams has to do with hiring, which is recruitment, the process of how they bring people on certainly, but also how they're developing their team and identifying talent in other areas of Cisco to be able to bring over. So, when I think about how we define a hiring culture, it's hiring and mobility for me at Cisco is how I think of it. And it's really when we have this embedded into the leader job whereby they have a certain number of business results we ask them to drive certainly as a leader but it's also at Cisco we have a certain number of leadership uh behaviors that we expect them to drive and this runs the span from how they run engagement pulses with their teams. um are they utilizing our weekly team space check-in tool, which is to find out what everyone's priorities are, how they're addressing those priorities, what help they need in that. And then another piece of that is I would say newer to the ecosystem because this focus on culture of hiring um it's been

ongoing for us but I would say it's really been heavy over the last year going into the pandemic understanding all of the changes in the external marketplace where hiring has gotten really hard. We have a lot of practitioners on this call and I don't think anyone would say it's gotten easier over the last year. It's gotten really hard and this has highlighted this need with our leaders to really focus on hiring becoming more of a team sport. — Uh yeah, I I so empathize with what you're saying and I love that definition of the fandom. You said it would take five minutes for a CrossFit person to tell you. I'd say 30 seconds. You're being polite there. Um but yeah, I love that. I love that emotive way of describing it where you know they'll tell you all about what they're hiring for in the organization because that's so part of the culture. Like it kind of comes to Michael's point, right? You just know it and that's a great way to observe it that people just come out with that. It's they're so passionate. It's the culting culture I guess when you look about hiring culture. — This might seem obvious to all of us in talent acquisition, the talent space that of course hiring is important. But let me just kind of pull back to Cisco, let's say at an executive level, right? Why is this important? Why does it go up the chain of importance to near the top for an organization like Cisco considering I imagine all the competing priorities all the other things that you could focus on? Organizations can't focus on everything. Of course, why is it important for Cisco? Why does it why do you feel it goes up the top for Cisco? — Yeah, I would say two things. First of all, we spend a lot of time listening to our employees. And over the last year, our people's strategy that we've stood up has been based on feedback from our employees, our leaders, and our executives. And one of the biggest things that came out was hiring. You know, when we ask people, what is important to you? What are the things you think we need to do better? What where are the areas of greatness? Hiring always pops up in that. So, it was the number one focus of our people strategy in this last fiscal year pulling into this fiscal year. So, I would say number one, it's very visible. So it's something we talk about but even more broadly if you think about Cisco every product that we develop that we sell every time someone develops something sells something or supports it with a client that's a person that we brought into the organization and that visceral connection to uh we're not just a 78,000 person company where things get done by magic. people. People move things forward. People drive innovation at Cisco. And so every person that we bring into a team is a factor and that either contributes to it or detracts from it at the end of the day. And so I think this realization that it's so critical to everything that we do that we have high performing teams and great hiring process and mobility process is a pillar for high performing teams. — Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like you know essentially you know hiring is controlling the front door to everything. like you know who's in the room and it's so important to get that right mix and I may mention the kind of importance of diversity inclusion with that mix earlier on as well and you've mentioned the importance of internal mobility I totally agree with you and I like that you see it in that wider context I'm going to come back to you to maybe tease out a question related to what I asked our previous panelists which is know what do you think is are some of the barriers to internal mobility today because you know with a great recruiting culture, you're probably nailing external talent acquisition and doing it really well. Um, but you know, there is it's been recognized by most leaders there is a disconnect between how we do the internal mobility and how we do external hiring. What do you think are some of the obstacles there and perhaps and how would you go about fixing them to really align what we the great stuff we do in external hiring with what we could be doing with internal hiring? — Yeah, I mean I my perspective is there are three things that really prohibit this from happening. Um the first this is not going to be popular to say but I'm going to say it. Um sometimes it's a tool you know it's a tool issue in terms of how do you it is easier to go on to LinkedIn and identify the background and skills of external talent sometimes than it is to find them in your internal ecosystem. So that can be a bit of an issue. But I think even larger than that, there's a cultural issue around talent hoarding and this concept of is this Cisco talent or is this my Kelly's talent, you know, and the idea that when we bring people into the organization, we need to elevate our thinking a little bit on this. These are not just employees for our team. These are employees for the entire ecosystem. And there will be times they work on your team. other teams. But that thing that I think inhibits us sometimes is this idea that when you get a high performing person, this desire to really hold on to them. So my comment earlier about leadership capabilities, there has to be something in leadership capabilities around your ability to identify, develop and move talent along within your organization is an indication of how good are you as a leader. And we did a hour and a half session on this in our teams week. We pull our leaders together for teams week

a couple times a year where we basically go into a topic that we want to educate them on. And we picked building a culture of hiring and mobility as the internal teams week session. And we had three executives come in to talk about this. And one of the biggest things that our employees were putting in the chat was around this concept of talent hoarding. You know, they're sometimes concerned to tell their leader they'd like to do something else. They don't want to be punished for wanting to do something else. So being able to free up talent to move across the ecosystem and make sure that leaders understand that it is their role to develop and to move that talent, you know, is critically important. And then the third thing I would say that can kind of be a barrier around some of this is bias. You know, you do have this we don't have that talent here. You know, they have much better talent doing that at Google. Let's go raid Google and get the Google talent to come and do this job. And sometimes that's just perception. you know, it's perception between what you've seen someone do and not really understanding their full capabilities. And this came up a little bit in the earlier panel, but this we in the hiring organization, in the mobility organization, the other thing we're talking about a lot is this reskilling and upskilling. Because the reality is with the quote around more jobs for recruiters and software engineers right now, we are never going to catch it with external hiring alone. We also have to look at our teams and we how do we upskill and reskill and create opportunities for people to move because skills are dynamic. They're not static. So how do we make sure that we're enabling our employees to do that? So that third being really just this bias this idea that we can go find someone who is kind of for lack of a better term offtheshelf ready to do this job versus saying Johnny has skills in these three areas and we think he has strong capabilities in this area. How do we enable that? I love that and I love the kind of team Cisco approach as opposed to team me it's team Cisco and you measured metrics and you me me me me me ntioned you know the me me me mentioned you know the focus on leadership and owning these things. I've heard of organizations too few unfortunately perhaps who give leadership metrics such as how many people did you provide to the rest of the organization? Did you help promote up to another level outside your team literally as a metric that drives their bonus? Um, speaking of those kind of outcomes or are or goals, what are some of the kind of outcomes, metrics, KPIs you're hoping to drive at Cisco with this focus on a hiring culture? When you come back to measurement, what are some of the things that you know interest you or you really I know you're very dashboard focused, you've got great metrics in different areas in the organization. What are some of the key ones that would indicate we're doing a good job or a bad job on hiring culture? — Yeah, we you're right. We do measure a lot of things. you know, we can go into our process at any given point and see how we're doing. Um, some of the key things that we are focused on, number one is experience. And so, this is part of the reason why we invested in working with social talent around how do we train our leaders to be exceptional interviewers because there is an experience piece that happens and we measure our candidates both selected and non- selected. What was your experience in the interview process? And the reason this is critically important, there is the recruiting element and this came up in the earlier panel. Recruiting culture versus hiring culture. You know the way I see those different is hiring culture is the recruiting element plus plus. So once they're in the door, what do you do with them? What is the experience that they have with you? And whether they ultimately join Cisco or not, we want them to leave this process with an experience that said that was a good experience. I would have liked to gotten selected. I didn't get selected, but I would recommend Cisco to another organization. the leaders showed up well in the interviews. People are prepared. They ask relevant questions. So, we focus largely in from a data standpoint on what is the experience that the candidates are having. Now, one of the things that we're exploring to support hiring is part of our people strategy is having a hiring manager metric that has four quadrants looking at how did they do during that cycle. And to be clear, this isn't a goal to kind of weaponize the data and come back and you know beat people above the head and neck with it. It's more of a information we want to provide executives to say you've declared this as important because I think our executives understand the importance of hiring without a doubt. So you've declared this as important. How are you doing? You know, so this four quadrant could look at what is the experience of the candidates that are going through. How many employer referrals went through the process? You know, did you actually generate? How quickly did you respond to the candidates that we sent you? You know, there's a myriad of data that we could put in this, but the idea is we're already measuring our leaders on how well are they doing as a people leader. If we accept that hiring is central to the role of a people leader, then measuring it through this four quadrant piece and just giving it out and saying this is what's happening and then allowing them to get intellectually curious about that data. Well, why is my experience rating only a four, you know, can we get into this and then just information is power, right? Come with the data. So, we're thinking of it largely through that lens. — I absolutely love that. Like I remember speaking with a good friend of mine in Microsoft's TA team a few uh months ago and she was sharing with me how I asked her how did Microsoft begin to turn the tide on some of their diversity efforts

and she was saying it didn't change until we made it a leader metric. — Um it's not a hard metric. There's an element of softness with discretion around that, but it became something that everyone was measured upon and everyone had to be accountable for at the end of every period. And all of a sudden, everyone was invested in making this work, right? Metrics work. And I know you're not suggesting that that Cisco is done on your journey to being a hiring culture. But let's say where would you put yourself at the moment in terms of on your journey? Where is you as a company in rolling out a hiring culture? Would you say you're midway starting off towards the end? What would you say where would you say you are at the moment in that? — I would actually say we're probably early to midway but I would quantify that with we have points of brilliance in our organization and let me bring an example to you. We have an engineering leader we hired externally who came in and I had a conversation with this executive probably three months after he was here and he was shocked that we did not request or expect leaders to passively manage five to 10 candidates at a time. And it was a fascinating conversation because he said every organization I've worked in I've just expected it. You know it's a role of a leader to passively manage five to 10 candidates at a time. And to be clear, that doesn't mean they're talking to them every week because time is the biggest currency. You know, we're not going to ask our leaders to become full-time recruiters, but he had that expectation. And so, we have areas in the organization, I would say sales is pretty brilliant at it for all the reasons that were mentioned previously. They understand they always be selling. They're very comfortable networking. They're comfortable selling the company. They're comfortable selling themselves. We have areas in engineering and customer experience that are pretty brilliant at it. Um, Maria Martinez, who is an EVP in our 1X organization, we hired her to lead customer experience. And I will sometimes use her as an example when people say, "I don't have the time. " When you're asking someone or trying to train them as to how to be a talent attractor, and they say, "I don't have the time. " You know, one of the things we have in our back pocket is, "Well, Maria has the time. " Who has less time than Maria? She's running the largest function at Cisco. She's an EVP. You know, she's got a huge argument. And one of the first things she did when she came to Cisco is invest time building out her team personally. She didn't just go to executive recruiting and say, "I need these five things. Find them. " She immediately went into her network and started personally calling people that she knew would contribute to her team. And so there are areas where we have this and it happens naturally and intuitively. There are areas that it doesn't. And in the areas that it doesn't, the way that we're trying to double down is through really what is the everything comes down to what is the whiff? Why should they care? And so why should you spend your time doing this? And one of the things that I will always say to executives and we try to bring into conversations is if you don't have time to focus on hiring exceptional talent, when are you going to find the time to performance manage that talent or to rehire that talent a second time? Because if you think about the difference between a great hire and an okay hire, all of us who've led teams, we know that difference. A great hire contributes to like the productivity of your team at such a different level. And so when you bring it in on this visceral level with the leaders, they tend to go, "Ah, yeah. " Because we've all experienced that. Any leader you've ever had has had okay talent and fabulous talent. So putting it in that context usually helps. But to make that very long answer a little bit shorter, I would say we are uh probably midway through on this. And what's really helped us is the elevation of hiring as the number one part of the people strategy that we worked on. And to be fair, I don't know if that would have made it to number one had we not experienced all the challenges we have over the last year with, you know, the great resignation is a lot of recruiters read that article and practitioners have been talking about it. People leaving the workforce uh allowing people to work from anywhere in this new hybrid world, people companies like ours where remote work was a differentiator. It is no longer a differentiator. And so everybody is kind of attracting your talent. And so I don't know if two years ago we would have been able to make as much progress as we've made over the last year because of the pain that we've had in the system with regards to hiring. — You're right. Now is the time. If any leaders are listening to this wondering should we do it now? It's never been a better time to prioritize this and get the buy in. I love the what you shared about leaders and having you know the time to have the court five candidates. A good friend of mine who uh runs TA globally, one of the big four firms will explain to me how they've always mapped out, you know, making sure we have a backup talent for every executive role and down to, you know, let's say C minus 4, let's say. And more recently, they've said, well, they've looked at that and said, how diverse is the panel of potential candidates and force diversity. So, they're not just asking people to make sure they're managing five. They're looking at who makes up the five and anticipating the actual the candidate pool to be diverse to drive future leadership. So really connecting the dots. Kelly, uh we're going to keep you on for the next panel. My time with you is over. So many more

questions I want to ask, our audience have been asking, but uh I listen to your long answers all day. So don't don't try and shorten them. There's pearls of wisdom in there. And thanks so much. Stay on the line because I'm going to ask you to join our next panel.